Fifty-one lawn chairs and home plate were planted on the Hayden family's front yard on Sherwood Avenue in Bexley yesterday. The odd chair was for the umpire.

Michael Arace, The Columbus Dispatch

Fifty-one lawn chairs and home plate were planted on the Hayden family’s front yard on Sherwood Avenue in Bexley yesterday. The odd chair was for the umpire.

The field stretched over the Plank family driveway and expanded across the Planks’ front lawn. Towering over the hedge in center field was a plywood wall, a Little Green Monster, emblazoned with “SHERWOOD YARDS.”

A scoreboard operator stood on a stepladder behind the monster and, at 10?a.m., he got busy. The third annual Wiffle Ball World Series began with pool play. Twenty-five two-man teams comprised mostly of high-school boys played until only one team was left (#3rdwbws).

“Fifty kids — that’s a pretty good-sized tournament,” Dan Mullany, president of Wiffle Ball Inc., said in a telephone interview from Shelton, Conn.

Mullany would know. His grandfather and his father — two more Dan Mullanys — invented the Wiffle ball at their kitchen table in 1953. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. Mullany’s grandfather was a former industrial league pitcher, between jobs, with a second mortgage out on the house, when the idea struck him.

He saw his boys in the backyard playing with a broomstick and a little plastic golf ball. He liked that they were not breaking any windows — but he did not like that they were killing themselves trying to throw curveballs. He figured there had to be a way to make a plastic ball break without endangering young arms.

Within a few days, he and his son, working with baseball-sized plastic containers, came up with the slots on one side. A family business — and an American backyard, front yard, side yard, schoolyard, back alley, blacktop and beachfront pastime — was born.

The field is whatever is available, which is the beauty of the game — that, and the bendability of the Wiffle ball, so elegantly designed that it has been beating back high-tech wannabes for nearly 70 years.

The rules are what you make them.

“I date back to the invention of dirt,” said Dick Schneider, 74, who was grilling hot dogs on the Plank’s patio yesterday, hot dogs that were delivered in waves to the 50 players competing in the series.

“For us, it was broomsticks and tennis balls on Thurman Avenue, near old Bennett Junior High,” Schneider said. “This here — this is beautiful for this day and age. It’s a neighborhood thing. People say the kids don’t do this sort of thing anymore. Well, here they are.”

Sherwood Yards is the brainchild of Schneider’s grandson, Matt Plank, and Matt’s next-door neighbor, Peter Hayden. The one attends St. Charles Prep, the other Bexley High. It took a month for their crew to build, paint and erect the Little Green Monster. They finished the night before the tournament.

“We started with eight teams three years ago,” Plank said. “It just sort of grew. We have kids here from all over the place.”

Sherwood Yards’ ground rules: Pitches are to be kept at moderate speed. There are two outs per inning. Kickball rules — a base runner is out when struck with a tossed ball — are in effect. Anything hit to right field is a foul ball. A batted ball must clear the hedge in the back of the Little Monster to be declared a home run. A ball that gets under the hedge is a double. A ball that goes through the scoreboard slots is a triple.

Not long after the first pitch was thrown, curious onlookers were stopping to take pictures. Middle-aged men were dropping by to see if they could get in a few swings, and to provide instructions that began, “Now let me tell you how this game should be played …”

“I remember the first tournament I ever saw,” said Mullany, the scion of the Wiffle ball empire. “My dad took my brother and me to a dairy farm in Frederick, Md., in 1975. They mowed a field out of a piece of the farm. When I saw Field of Dreams 15 years later, I remember thinking, ‘Man, this looks very familiar.' "

Is this heaven?

In 1980, in a place not far from Wiffle ball headquarters, a kid named Michael Wilson played in his basement and had an allegedly unhittable drop pitch. I racked him. And he did not touch my rising fastball.

That is my story, and I’m sticking with it. We all have them, don’t we? We have stories of worn-out base paths on the lawn, of arguments over crazy ground rules, of stupid kids trying to use bats that were not yellow.

In 2061, upon the 50th anniversary of the Wiffle Ball World Series, there will be a lot of old men sitting around and telling stories — and getting up and taking a few cuts.

Michael Arace is a sports reporter for The Dispatch.

marace@dispatch.com

@MichaelArace1

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